Why Marx Helps Understand Capitalism

My guests on today’s episode are historians Andrew Hartman and James Livingston. Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author, most recently, of Karl Marx in America. Jim is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea.

I asked Andrew and Jim on the show to talk to me about Karl Marx and his continued influence on the American left. Really, if I’m being honest, I asked them on to help me solve a problem that I’ve been feeling increasingly compelled to solve, which is that I have a very strong intuition that Marxism is a profound drag on the capacity of the American left to achieve what I would like it to achieve, which is to exert meaningful power in opposition to big money in all its forms, but I am embarrassingly vague on the why or how Marx continues to exert such pull.

The bosses have so, so much power in America, and I fear it’s slowly killing us, and we desperately to find a way to rebalance the scales. But precisely the kinds of people and groups to whom we’ve looked, historically, to organize fundamental resistance to the evils of big money are the ones who seem least capable of talking and acting in ways that might get the job done. And I blame Marxism for some, though certainly not all, of that incapacity.

So I have all these very strong feelings, but I don’t know how to talk to the people I might hope to persuade in a language that might be persuasive to them.

I could tell a story about the various sins of various Marxist movements of the last century that might be persuasive to some people — and in fact have told versions of that story — but I don’t think that that story would be persuasive to contemporary Marxist-influenced intellectuals. They know all that history, have already baked it into their perspective. What I’d need to do is talk theory to them, and I don’t really grasp the theory. And maybe even more than not understanding the theory, I don’t understand, viscerally, why people continue to be so drawn to it. I don’t grok the lived experience of being a 21st century American leftist who feels compelled to draw on Marxist concepts and language to think and talk through the problems we face. I can’t mirror those neurons. And it kind of drives me nuts.

So this episode is a very selfish effort to help reduce the level of my vexedness, and I appreciate Jim and Andrew for their indulgence of me and for their uncompensated labor in bringing some clarity to my confusion.If you’re interested in learning more about Andrew’s new book, by the way, the American Prestige podcast is producing a six-part series, Marx Prestige, where Andrew and Daniel Bessner work their way through the history covered in the book. I’m looking forward to it.

Peace.

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